The present invention relates to publish-subscribe systems and, more specifically, to a publish-subscribe system such as RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) having contextual support for improved locating of user-relevant articles of interest from a plurality of article feed sources.
Current Internet or World Wide Web (“Web”) publish-subscribe (“pub-sub”) systems such as RSS and Atom enable users to subscribe to selected information from various web sources. Usually, the RSS system is set up in a one-to-one relationship, i.e., one user subscription is assigned to each article feed source. Thus, if the user wants information from different feed sources, the user must separately subscribe to each desired feed source. An RSS feed source, which is typically made available on the Web at various well-known content provider websites, contains summary details of website content, such as news items or blog entries. The data can be extracted from the RSS feed source and presented on other websites or accessed directly by Internet users using an RSS reader. Then, if an RSS item looks interesting to the user, the user can click on the link provided to enable the user to go to the originating website and read the full item. Invariably in these publish-subscribe systems the user is limited to subscribing to articles of interest by topic or keyword only. Thus, searching and locating articles of interest is typically limited in that it is performed by searching of topic-related keywords in the title of the article.
This type of arrangement has other limitations, for example a lack of intelligence for contextual support within the RSS reader in the RSS system. Current RSS systems are usually syntax-based, i.e., the published page is considered as a string (e.g., HTML or XML format) by the RSS reader. Typically there are no semantic-based operations supported by RSS readers. An exemplary semantic operation is sorting the release sale price for all of a particular new type of digital camera. Without such an operation, users are required to read all the published pages and sort the camera price manually themselves. This often causes the user to review thousands of articles that are returned based on the user's selected topic of interest. From a practical point of view, this is an unmanageable and a non-user friendly situation for the user.
The limitations with this type of publish-subscribe system also include a lack of aggregation of a collection of articles from different feed sources that are relevant to the user's interest or purpose of reading. Current RSS systems are commonly limited to aggregating articles from a single RSS feed source that share the same keyword in the title. Another limitation is the inability to filter articles to find the useful information that the user is seeking. Even further, the limitations include a lack of inference support such as inferring a car brand from articles that talk about a car model within that brand where the article does not mention the brand. Also, current publish-subscribe systems typically have no summary report or recommendation capability to assist the user in making a decision. These limitations all go towards the lack of ability for the user of an RSS system to locate only those articles that are relevant to the user's interest or purpose of reading.
As an example, a user who subscribed to a topic labeled “real estate” may be interested only in finding the least expensive mortgage interest rate so the user can decide if the user can afford to buy a particular house. However, since the user has subscribed to all “real estate” articles from various web sources by topic, the user's RSS reader may be flooded with a relatively large amount of articles per day, and typically only a small number of them are related to the mortgage interest rate that the user is interested in. This causes a lot of time and effort for the user to locate the exact information the user is seeking and is most useful to the user (i.e., the least expensive mortgage rate). As such, the user may eventually get frustrated and give up on the particular publish-subscribe system.